Jim Faust and Noreen Finnegan stood knee-deep in the Deerfield River in the northwest corner of Massachusetts, as he showed her how to fly fish.
"So with this amount of line out, I want you to go ahead and cast that," Faust directed.
Her wrist pivoted the rod forward and the line created an arc that drops gently into the river.
"Yes, there you go!" Faust commented, encouragingly. "Now you feel that?"
"Yeah!" Finnegan responded, clearly pleased with her cast.
Faust is a retired anesthesiologist, and these days shares his passion for fly fishing with people in addiction recovery.
Analyzing the mechanics of her casting, Faust suggested she pause for a moment on the backswing.
"And you think that when you pause, nothing's happening," he said. "Probably the same thing in life. Sometimes when you pause, all the important stuff is happening. And that's what's happening with a fly cast."
The two met at a rehab center. Finnegan was getting treatment for alcohol addiction.
Faust came in to teach how to tie flies -- the tiny lures that are used for flyfishing. And Finnegan knew then she wanted to get out on the river to see those flies in action.
"It's so peaceful," Finnegan said, standing in the river and looking around at the serene scene around her. "It really just gets you, like Jim says, time to pause, you know. It's perfect. It just gives you time to focus on just what's around you and just, like, drop everything."
Faust's nonprofit is called Adam's Parachute, in honor of his son, Adam.
"When he got into recovery – and he had two years and two months in recovery – he devoted his life to helping other people who were seeking recovery," Faust said of his son.
Two years ago, Adam saved the life of a young man who had overdosed.
"I think that triggered him," Faust said.
The next morning, Adam overdosed, himself.
"So Adam passed," Faust said, choking up. "And he's still with me. He's with us right here, I can promise you. But then came, how do we move forward? Do we move forward?"
That's when he came up with Adam's Parachute. It's actually the name of a flyfishing fly. And Faust sees it as an apt metaphor for his son's final moments. Adam had one parachute, and he gave it to someone else.
Now, the nonprofit Adam's Parachute shares fly fishing with people in recovery.
"I'll probably get 200 people out fishing this year," Faust said. "I got 100 out last year."
Among them is Jared Freeman.
"I never was comfortable in my own skin, so when I was alone by myself, my mind would just race and I'd use substances to deal with reality and my own thoughts," Freeman said. "With fly fishing, it forces me to be okay with my own thoughts. And I come out in nature and I absorb the tranquility and the peacefulness of what's around me, and it helps me to acknowledge and calm myself about where I am in life right now."
Faust has recruited other anglers to help him teach. Amy Delaney, who's in recovery herself, discovered fly fishing through a program for veterans called Healing Waters.
"Jim was one of my mentors that taught me how to fly fish," she said. "And then when he started Adam's Parachute, I immediately offered to help."
Fly fishing has played an important role in her own recovery, Delaney said.
"When you're active and using, and when you're sitting there trying to get clean, when you're sitting at home and there's the distractions and the people, places, things, and you're going 100 miles an hour, like, it's chaos," Delaney said. "When you come out here, it is peace."
Delaney says she was lucky. She knows too many who didn't make it.
"I just want to be able to save one. That's all I want to do," she said. "I just want to be able to do for somebody else what was done for me. I have to."
Faust said being out on the river, and sharing it with others, is helping him process his grief.
"The Irish call it a thin place," Faust said. "You know, the place where the veil between the heavenly and the earthly or between the human and the spiritual is thin and, you know, maybe it's even transparent sometimes, but you can feel it. These are my thin places."
Many people in recovery haven't found their thin place yet, Faust said. And he's trying to help them to do just that.
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